A nice little surprise: Carto

I've got no shortage of computer/video games to keep myself occupied with, but I also have an XBox Game Pass subscription.  So, when I see a new game pop up there that looks even mildly interesting, at the price of "you've already paid for it", I'll gladly download it and take a closer look.  This week, that led me to get Carto, an odd little adventure-puzzle game.  The story follows the trope of a disaster separating the main character from their family, but with a touch of the magician's apprentice thrown in, with the result of your character washing up on the shore of an island, far from home and family, but with a power to help you make your return trip.

The power you get, in this case, is a map of the local area, broken up into tiles you can shift and rotate, which actually alters the layout of the local area in the process.  You still have to match terrain types on the edges of tiles, much like a game of Carcassonne, but that's not much of a challenge, especially early on.  From that basic beginning, you set out to explore the world, gathering new tiles along the way by various means, while you meet the inhabitants of the various different regions in pursuit of your goals.

Carto is sort of like one of the old point-and-click adventure games, but replacing the obtuse puzzles and pixel-hunting with mostly tile puzzles of various sorts, and I rather liked that.  It's also not terribly long, as I was able to play most of the way through in one sitting over the course of an afternoon and early evening... but only most of the way through.  The last level (if the narrative hints aren't totally misleading at least) takes you to the "edge of the world", which is an arctic/antarctic setting that ramps up the difficulty in a couple of different ways.  First, they replace the simplicity of manipulating tiles with manipulating fixed 4-tile chunks and trying to fit those together in various valid combinations - annoying, but that much I was willing to take on.  Then, part way through, they added a "sliding on the ice" mechanic that requires alignment of "tracks" on the various ice field tiles, and that was the bit that tipped the scales from enjoyable to bothersome for me, so I stopped there.

So, yeah, fair odds I'll never officially finish this game, but it's not like I don't know what the ending is likely to be (it's not a deep story, by any means).  The rest of the game kept me entertained for a number of hours, enough so that I'd recommend it to almost anyone to check out, at the right price.

An innovation more games should embrace

 While there haven't been a lot of Harry Potter-esque "going to wizarding school" games, there have been a few, widely varying in quality.  So, when Ikenfell first crossed my path, with strategy RPG trappings, I was mildly interested, but the pseudo-8-bit visuals turned me off a bit (turns out, I'm old enough that old Nintendo graphics aren't part of my childhood, so I don't get the nostalgia kick from them that many do), so I decided to give it a pass.

Well, it showed up on XBox Game Pass yesterday, and, at the price of "you've already paid for it," I figured it wouldn't hurt to give it a go.  I've only played a little ways into it so far, but, at the moment, I would probably just call it "inoffensive".  There have only been a couple of surprises, one of which is a timed-input fighting system that reminds me of Paper Mario, but I'm not entirely sold on whether it's a good thing or not this early on.

However, that's not the innovation I mentioned in the title.  That role belongs to the cats in the game.  Being a magic school, it's got cats all over, apparently... and the first one I met, if you "use" it, lets you pet it (important in its own right, in the minds of some), restores your health, and acts as a save point.  Yes, it's an unimaginably small touch, but fraught with implications, the first being safety... after all, if the cat's not freaking out and letting you pet it, you can be pretty sure that nothing nasty is in the vicinity to cause you grief.  Second is personality, since I've seen many, many games with bulky, mystical save points whose whole purpose is to get across that they're a feature of the environment, not in any way portable - using a cat makes similar sense, as anybody who has tried to make a cat go somewhere it doesn't want to go can attest to.  Third... well, I have no proof that this is implemented in this game, early as I am in it, but using creatures with agency for save points brings up all sorts of opportunities for mischief, whether that's just cats moving to different locations on a whim, or deciding they don't want to be petted just then, or deciding as a group to go hide, or be captured, or be impersonated by something nasty, or, or, or...

So, yeah, I'm not sold on the game as a whole just yet.  On the other hand, this one touch has piqued my interest enough to say I'll come back for another look.  Maybe there's more surprises waiting just a bit further into the game.  In the meantime, all you other developers, more useful pettable cats, please.